Calc Stacking

Calc stacking refers to the practice of using results from one calculation in order to calculate other feats.

Usually calc stacking is believed to be flawed, so that calculations that use it should be disregarded almost always. Usually people try to use it for calculating characters speed, but also different uses are imaginable.

The reason it is usually disregarded is because it has shown itself inconsistent many times and usually gives inflated results. Through the method any long running franchises could also scale their stats infinitely upwards without actually ever showing any feats in the range they are listed.

Note that pixel scaling over several steps is usually accepted (even through less steps are viewed as better than more steps).

Hiding Calculations

Hiding calculations is the practice of trying to avoid calculating a feat in order to be able to use the result in another calculation. In other words it is the practice of trying to fool people into not noticing that calc stacking is being used.

This usually occurs if a feat is quantified per a rule of thumb instead of precisely calculated. A typical example would be a character dodging a bullet from a short distance being ranked as "Supersonic" and then using that ranking to calculate the speed of another character, whose speed one can compare to the former in some feat.

While it is acceptable to rank a character by such a self-evident feat without a calculation, one should keep in mind that the unwritten calculation is only skipped due to being trivial, but is still the justification for the ranking. Hence calc stacking will still be an issue for such feats.

Examples of calc-stacking that can not be applied

Character A moved so fast that character B couldn't react to him. So character A needs to have crossed the distance until he could be seen by character B again in the time that character B requires to react. Since we know from a calculation how long character B needs to react we can calculate the speed of character A based on that.

Character A has a certain speed through a calculation. He can not dodge the projectiles from character B from 2 meter distance. But Character C can dodge them from 1 meter distance, so character C has to be twice as fast as character A.

Character A was calculated to be able to punch with an energy of 50 000 Joules. Assuming his fist weights about 0.5 kg, it needed to move at least with Mach 1.3 to get that much energy. So the attack speed of that character and the speed of everyone who can dodge his punches is supersonic.